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Bangladesh’s progress in terms of achieving the sustainable development goals (SDGs) has been quite exceptional and the country is now seen as a role model for sustainable development, particularly in terms of locally-led adaptation.
While Bangladesh’s achievements have been great, there are still some challenges on the road to achieving our SDGs successfully. One of the key challenges is the lack of good data.
To measure progress towards the SDGs, data on all SDG indicators is required. But at present, we do not have data on 110 indicators out of the 232 SDG indicators.
The Strengthening Institutional Capacity for SDGs Achievement in Bangladesh (SC4SDG) project is a multi-year initiative to support the government in achieving the SDGs.
This initiative aims to provide technical assistance in the formulation of evidence-based policy making, implementation, localisation, financing, monitoring, evaluation, reporting and outreach of SDGs in Bangladesh.
This project aims to go beyond the conventional partnership between the government and private sector.
It also encourages the collaboration of NGOs, CSOs, think-tanks, academia and media with the public sector to ensure the “whole of the society” approach to attain SDG goals.
“Each of us can play our part here. It is our responsibility to contribute as an individual. If we fulfil our individual responsibilities, we will be able to contribute gradually at the national and international level,” opined Sudipto Mukerjee, resident representative of UNDP Bangladesh, emphasising the role of the individual in the whole of society approach.
For the implementation of SDGs, it is important to focus on alleviating poverty, ensuring environmental sustainability, and adopting the whole of society approach with an emphasis on private sector investment.
Being mindful of this and for reducing the financial gap in order to attain the SDGs, the UNDP-UNEP Poverty-Environment Action for Sustainable Development Goals (PEA4SDGs), through its SC4SDG project, is working in tandem with the government, especially the General Economics Division, by engaging different stakeholders.
In Bangladesh, the data gap persists due to a lack of real-time, quality and representative data.
This gap was highlighted in a programme organised by the SC4SDG project of UNDP Bangladesh and the UNDP-UNEP project PEA4SDGs, in association with The Daily Star.
During the discussion, participants cited the need for real time data to not only monitor the country’s SDG indicators, but to formulate realistic policies that go beyond just these goals.
Dr Binayak Sen, director general of the Bangladesh Institute of Development Studies (BIDS), said: “We were still using labour force data from fiscal year 2016-17.”
“This means that for about five to seven years, we do not know anything that is happening in the country in terms of employment, decent work, poverty, income inequality, demographic and health indicators,” Sen added.
Dr Fahmida Khatun, executive director of the Centre for Policy Dialogue (CPD), said that the unavailability of disaggregated data was a major challenge for SDG implementation and that real-time, authentic and representative data is a must for formulating realistic policies.
She also emphasised the importance of open data, which ensures free and easy access to essential information.
Riti Ibrahim Ahsan, a former secretary to Bangladesh government, opined that there is a need for more statistical data.
There should be a focus on gathering union-level data, and that can be combined later to get national-level data. It will also help avoid duplication of data, she added.
The government has an important role to play here, not only in terms of reaching out to different organisations who gather data in the country, but also to restructure their own process of data collection.
Increasing the frequency of surveys by different government bodies as well as providing adequate manpower to conduct them is the first step that needs to be taken.
In the long term, the approach for the government to establish a proper system should be one where regular data is collected to ensure that it can use the data from third parties to corroborate the quality of its own data set.
In order to reduce the dearth of data, participants from the private sector recommended collaboration between the private sector and government to share their respective organisation’s data.
There are also many NGOs working throughout the country that regularly collect data from their different project areas.
For example, Palash K Das, director of the Ultra-poor Graduation Programme of Brac, shared that his organisation has been reaching 65,000 households living under the poverty line every year.
The government can take this data from organisations like Brac, Das added.
All this data from private organisations should be brought together, and that will significantly contribute to the policymaking process, he suggested.
Emphasis must be placed on good data as simply collecting data without ensuring that it meets the requirement of good data will be more of a hindrance rather than helping the process.
Good data must be accurate, complete, reliable, relevant, and frequently updated.
Bangladesh is well positioned to emerge as a global intellectual leader with regards to achieving the SDGs.
But to do so, the government must formulate the appropriate policy framework and develop specific action plans to ensure that marginalised and vulnerable groups of society are included in the development process.
Doing so would allow us to fulfil the core aspirations of attainting SDGs: “Leave No One Behind (LNOB)”.
However, this particular feat cannot be achieved without the availability of good data as without it, our interventions or long-term policies cannot address the emerging challenges of the country.
(TDS)
